How to find tempo of samples with no drums (ambient)

N

N.A.K

New member
Whenever I try to sample/chop a loop from an ambient track, the timing is always off and the drums are off when I lay them out. Anyway to find the tempo of these tracks?
 
even without drums there should still be some tempo cues in the music

in my experience you will find yourself tapping your foot or fingers to anything that resembles these tempo cues
 
bandcoach said:
even without drums there should still be some tempo cues in the music

in my experience you will find yourself tapping your foot or fingers to anything that resembles these tempo cues
Click to expand...

THIS^

If you cant figure it out just chop it up with each individual count so you can rearrange them after your liking (or figure out where the counts are suposed to go).
 
What I've done with ambient tracks is just chop them up on longer notes, short notes, hits etc. Then when I'm making the actual song I just transpose it up or down to my liking and what fits the tempo of my song. After that everything usually falls in to place.
 
You can chop each note or chord individually and everything would be void of a tempo. This would give you the freedom to arrange your sample however you like.
 
i highlight the selection and keep letting it loop till it sounds correct. Then i load into a sampler (mpc or fl studio) and adjust tempo or pitch till it loops seamlessly then go from there
 
sometimes those slow ambient tracks don't have a same BPM throughout the whole song cause it's played live and very slow.
 
Get yourself a stopwatch and find out how long a bar is then use the length to determine the BPM......it really is the best technique for determining tempos, cutting loops and stretching and it's not just because the values are all linked but because you are not messing with your only point of reference during editing.....that's the mistake people make by nudging loop markers around until they think it sounds right.......it's all quite unnecessary, if one bar is exactly 2 seconds long your tempo is 120 BPM and 1 bar of music at 120 BPM is exactly 2 seconds.....just like if a bar is 2.526 seconds long your tempo would be 95 BPM and vice versa.....it's all related.

Once you know how it only takes a couple of seconds to find tempo, cut a loop and stretch audio without skewing the timing off toward the back end.

In this example I determine how many seconds of audio there is in one bar of music with a tempo of 95 BPM.

60 seconds / (95 BPM /4 beats) = 2.526 seconds

To work out the tempo from the seconds......

60 seconds / 2.526 seconds x 4 beats = 95 BPM

Once you know the formula you will be way faster than you ever were without it.....seriously I can cut shit up on hardware faster than most cats can do with a mouse because I know exactly what I am doing before I even do it.
 
hollandturbine said:
Get yourself a stopwatch and find out how long a bar is then use the length to determine the BPM......it really is the best technique for determining tempos, cutting loops and stretching and it's not just because the values are all linked but because you are not messing with your only point of reference during editing.....that's the mistake people make by nudging loop markers around until they think it sounds right.......it's all quite unnecessary, if one bar is exactly 2 seconds long your tempo is 120 BPM and 1 bar of music at 120 BPM is exactly 2 seconds.....just like if a bar is 2.526 seconds long your tempo would be 95 BPM and vice versa.....it's all related.

Once you know how it only takes a couple of seconds to find tempo, cut a loop and stretch audio without skewing the timing off toward the back end.

In this example I determine how many seconds of audio there is in one bar of music with a tempo of 95 BPM.

60 seconds / (95 BPM /4 beats) = 2.526 seconds

To work out the tempo from the seconds......

60 seconds / 2.526 seconds x 4 beats = 95 BPM

Once you know the formula you will be way faster than you ever were without it.....seriously I can cut shit up on hardware faster than most cats can do with a mouse because I know exactly what I am doing before I even do it.
Click to expand...
Bro...this is FutureProducers-tell me the easy way to do it, your way takes too much thinking.
 
Pumpthrust said:
Bro...this is FutureProducers-tell me the easy way to do it, your way takes too much thinking.
Click to expand...

That is the easy way, it's just not the lazy way which takes longer and is less accurate........the difference is like putting in the effort to learn how to ride a bicycle vs walking everywhere because you are too lazy to learn a more efficient way of doing things.
 
hollandturbine said:
That is the easy way, it's just not the lazy way which takes longer and is less accurate........the difference is like putting in the effort to learn how to ride a bicycle vs walking everywhere because you are too lazy to learn a more efficient way of doing things.
Click to expand...
Agreed
I was being sarcastic in my original post. You know how it is around here-if the answer involves any actual thought beyond "what button do I press", people reject it.
 
Pumpthrust said:
Agreed
I was being sarcastic in my original post. You know how it is around here-if the answer involves any actual thought beyond "what button do I press", people reject it.
Click to expand...

Yeah I know...I just dropped that metaphor for the benefit of those unfortunates who think the lazy path is the quick path.
 
even without drums there should still be some tempo cues in the music

in my experience you will find yourself tapping your foot or fingers to anything that resembles these tempo cues
BC
Click to expand...

this is probably the easiest method and while tapping click on the bpm tap function in FL studio for example and it will give you a rough guess
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top